‘Wine-contamination’ of the Adriatic: Examples of punishing wine smugglers from medieval Dubrovnik
Strict import-export regulations of the medieval Dubrovnik (Ragusean) authorities included also a rather rigid control of the wine trade.
The Host in the late Middle Ages: superstitions, faith, miracles and magic
The problem of taking and metabolizing Christ had been a major concern in Medieval times.
Beef and Pork in the Middle Ages
Learn 10 things about the history of beef and pork in the Middle Ages
The Sumptuous Use of Food at Castle Marienburg (Malbork) at the Start of the Fifteenth Century
The prestige role of luxury food consumption was particularly visible during meetings of an international character: Teutonic-Lithuanian, Teutonic-Polish or Teutonic-Polish-Lithuanian, to which the grand master would come accompanied by the highest Order’s officials.
How to Make 24 Herring Pies for the King of England
Concerning the delivery of 24 Herring Pies parcel of the fee farm of the City of Norwich
Environmental Crusading: The Teutonic Knight’s Impact After the Baltic Crusades
Environmental archaeologist and Professor of Archeology at Reading, Dr. Aleks Pluskowski, examined Malbork and several other sites across Eastern and Northern Europe in his recent paper, The Ecology of Crusading: The Environmental Impact of Holy War, Colonisation, and Religious Conversion in the Medieval Baltic. Pluskowski is keenly interested in the impact the Teutonic Knights and Christian colonisation had on the region. His ambitious 4 year project on the ecological changes in this area recently came to a close at the end of 2014.
Is it possible to accurately recreate a loaf of medieval bread?
I propose that the experimental process is the best way to gain a better understanding of what bread was like for our medieval forebears and how it compared to the bread that we eat today?
Which Of These Foods Were Available In 15th Century England?
Some of these foods were available when King Richard III was on the throne, others were not. Can you guess what might have been on your shopping list back in 15th century England?
1500-year-old Byzantine grape seeds discovered in Israel
The charred grape seeds, over 1,500 years old, found in southern Israel excavation were used to produce the ‘Wine of the Negev’ – one of the finest and most renowned wines in the whole of the Byzantine Empire.
Ceremonial Drinking in the Viking Age
Drinking ceremonies played a very important social role in Viking Age Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England.
Tacuinum Sanitatis: A Way of Life
How to maintain one’s health in the Middle Ages – the advice from the Tacuinum Sanitatis
The oldest Onion in Denmark
A 1300-year-old onion has been discovered as part of a woman’s grave in Denmark.
The Taste of Medieval Food
When speaking of medieval foods, most people think of one or two things: drab, tasteless foods, or the historically inaccurate meals served at medieval reenactments where patrons eat sans utensils while watching some sort of entertaining reenactment. Both conceptions couldn’t be further from the truth.
Hearing, smelling, savoring, and touching in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s scholar’s have long recognized the poet’s keen sense of observation and have commented upon the poet’s ability to transfer his visual images to his writing.
Healthy Eating in the Middle Ages: the Tacuinum Sanitatis
In the late Middle Ages, princes and the powerful learnt the health and hygiene rules of rational medicine from the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a treatise on well-being and health widely disseminated in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae)
De Observantia Ciborum, an early 6th-century book on foods attributed to a Pseudo-Hippocrates, lists cucumere (snake melons) first among the vegetables. The pepone (watermelons), here too, are listed among other fruits that are eaten raw when ripe, pomegranates, grapes and figs, but there is no mention of melopepones or melones
Vegetables in the Middle Ages
Vegetables: A Biography, by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, offers the stories of eleven different vegetables – artichokes, beans, chard, cabbage, cardoons, carrots, chili peppers, Jerusalem artichokes, peas, pumpkins, and tomatoes – offering tidbits from science and agriculture to history, culture, and, of course, cooking. Here are a few excerpts from the book that detail their history during the Middle Ages
The Contours, Frequency and Causation of Subsistence Crises in Carolingian Europe (750-950)
The Contours, Frequency and Causation of Subsistence Crises in Carolingian Europe (750-950) Timothy P. Newfield Crisis Alimentarias en la Edad Media: Modelos, Explicaciones…
Serving the man that ruled: aspects of the domestic arrangements of the household of King John, 1199-1216
This thesis interrogates the evidence of the household ordinances from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, by using a corpus of record sources extant from 1199 onwards, which break through the façade of departmentalism to reveal the complexity of the royal household.
If the afterlife looks like a banquet
Medieval literature would prove the huge success of such an idea, so we are compelled to stop for a moment and ask ourselves the reasons for this reception. Why did men use to link heaven with repletion? And what shape did this longing take inside of their minds?
Obesity and Diet in Byzantium
I will list some of the causes and consequences of obesity in the Byzantine Empire. However, the aim of this report is to provide evidence to demonstrate that Byzantine physicians had treatments for obesity that are similar to modern day.
Yggdrasill and the divine ‘food chain’
One of the better-known images Old Norse mythology has passed down to us is, without a doubt, that of the ash Yggdrasill: the holy place of the gods. There, as High said to Gangleri, each day the Nordic deities held their courts.
Animals in Saxon and Scandinavian England
In this book an analysis of over 300 animal bone assemblages from English Saxon and Scandinavian sites is presented. The data set is summarised in extensive tables for use as comparanda for future archaeozoological studies.
Do evolutionary perspectives of morning sickness and meat aversions apply to large-scale societies? : an examination of medieval Christian women
Through an investigation of staple diets, religious dietary views, medical literature, and wives’ tales of medieval Christian women, aversions to animal flesh and animal products among pregnant women do not appear to be supported